


till sunbeams find you

by ellot



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 20:53:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1792870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellot/pseuds/ellot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He turns the envelope over in his hands and his breath catches when he sees his name written on the front. Spiky cursive and oh-so-familiar, even if he hasn’t seen it in years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	till sunbeams find you

**Author's Note:**

> much thanks to kimberly, erica, and siri. ♥
> 
> title comes from 'dream a little dream of me'.
> 
> i just wanted to write a scene where bucky and steve dance in an empty room, and then it grew into this because of course it did.

Natasha brings him the note. 

Steve turns a corner during his early morning run in Central Park, only a couple weeks after Tony finally convinced him to move back to New York and into the newly dubbed Avengers Tower, and finds her standing still in the middle of the pathway in front of him, holding out an envelope. 

He hadn’t even known she was in the country. Their contact’s been fairly limited since the takedown of Hydra and SHIELD along with it. The last he heard, she was somewhere in Eastern Europe, possibly with Barton. 

There’s a good chance that that’s only what Natasha _wanted_ everyone to believe though. Steve’s always thought of himself as able to read people pretty damn well, but Natasha is an exception. She _is_ exceptional after all.

Steve makes sure to keep his face straight as he keeps running towards her, trying to hide his surprise. He’s more than likely failed if the small smirk he can see at the corner of her lips is any indication. 

He comes to stop before her and takes the envelope without question because he trusts her, and she’d tell him if there was something more that he needed to know. If there was any danger at all. Steve can see from the way the smirk falls from her face, her solemn expression and the lack of idle chat she’s so fond of, that the letter is something Natasha considers important.

It’s nice, heavy stationery, he can tell, feeling the weight in his hand and stroking his fingers over the envelope. It’s so rare these days, in the age of cell phones and email to see such paper. Not that Steve could’ve afforded it back before, but he’d look at the sheets of fine paper before reaching for the cheap sketchbooks at the local art shop.

He turns the envelope over in his hands and his breath catches when he sees his name written on the front. Spiky cursive and oh-so-familiar, even if he hasn’t seen it in years.

Decades.

His hands start to shake and Natasha reaches over to steady them, curling their hands together of the envelope before he can drop it.

“Is he—?” Steve can’t finish the question. He doesn’t know how to finish the question with so many thoughts running through his mind. _Alright? In New York? Alive? Safe?_

“He came to me a few months ago,” Natasha says. “Wanted help remembering, wanted help getting better. Before he saw you again.”

Steve takes a deep breath. There’s so many things he wants to say, he doesn’t know where to start. “He could’ve come to me,” he finally tells her. He would have—he _would_ —do anything for Bucky.

Natasha smiles at him and shakes her head sadly. “James wanted to be better before seeing you again. Your face—your emotions—they can be terrifying in ways you don’t even realize, Steve. He wanted to understand.” 

She finally lets go of his hands and takes a step back. “You should read that,” she says, nodding at the envelope.

Steve looks down, tracing a finger gently over his name. By the time he looks up again, just a few seconds later, Natasha is gone.

Exceptional indeed.

 

The note is short.

_Dear Steve,_ it begins, still in that familiar hand. 

Then an unknown address, not far out of New York. 

There’s a drop of ink on the page as if a pen had been rested there, another sentence contemplated before the idea was discarded.

And finally, signed, _Bucky._

 

The address leads him to an empty building. It looks to be a rather nice community center or a fancy bar closed for the morning, not unlike some of the dance halls Bucky used to drag him to back before they both went to war. 

Sunlight dapples the wood floor, streaming through the high windows, and Steve’s footsteps echo eerily in the empty space as he walks towards the center of the room. 

It’s a terrible position to be in defensively, but Steve trusts Natasha. And Bucky. 

Bucky, who referred to himself as such in his note. Not the _Who the hell is Bucky?_ that Steve still hears in his nightmares, along with wordless screams and the image of Bucky falling and disappearing into a world of white. 

Steve comes to a standstill and waits, hope beating in his chest, constant as his heartbeat. 

He doesn’t have to wait long.

“Hello, Steve.”

“Bucky,” Steve breathes out, watching as the man steps out into the open. 

His hair is still long, tied back in a loose ponytail, and there’s scruff on his face that the Bucky of before would never have let stand, but it is undeniably Bucky standing there before him. There’s even the familiar affection in his eyes as he watches Steve that Steve has been sorely missing. 

“Hi.” Bucky shifts on his feet.

Steve smiles. It’s awkward— _they’re_ awkward—in a way that they were never together before, not since that first afternoon when Steve told a boy off for insulting a lady and got punched for his trouble. 

Steve totally had him on the ropes, he’d always say later, but Bucky came and helped him anyway. Steve had almost thrown a punch at Bucky then because he may have been small and scrawny, but he was _not_ helpless. He didn’t need strangers to come and try to rescue him, calling him “kid” in that tone of voice. Especially when they weren’t that much bigger than him.

Bucky had just grinned at him and extended his hand. “Hey there. I’m James Buchanan Barnes, but even my mama just calls me Bucky. What’s your name?”

Steve had stared at him, too surprised to know what to say.

“Or should I just call you Spitfire then?” Bucky said.

Steve scowled, but shook Bucky’s hand. “I’m Steve Rogers.” 

Less than a day later, they were best friends.

So yes, they’re awkward together in a way they haven’t been since that first day, but they’re _them._ It’s Bucky, with a metal arm and scars, but with such a warm expression Steve feels as if he’s in the presence of the sun, and it’s Steve standing before him feeling more alive than he has in years. 

More alive than he’s felt since Bucky fell from that train and half of Steve’s being fell with him.

“Hey,” Steve says.

Bucky laughs, a soft sound accompanied by what Steve thinks can be called a bashful smile—and that’s something new, Bucky being _bashful_. He’d always been too self-assured, too charismatic and charming, to have need to feel any bashfulness before. “Thanks for coming.”

“Of course. I’m always here for you.” He breathes deep, feeling his words want to try and run away from him. “Just, always.”

“Till the end of the line.”

Steve’s heart pounds. “You remember that?”

Bucky nods, and takes a careful step closer to Steve. “You’re not allowed to do that anymore, Steve. Dropping your shield and letting me hit you. Just...don’t. You could’ve _died_ and it would’ve been my fault. You think I could live with that? I couldn’t. I can’t.”

“I couldn’t fight you anymore, Bucky,” Steve says, resisting the urge to reach over and touch Bucky, to make sure he’s _real_ and this isn’t another one of Steve’s vivid dreams. “It’s not in me to do it. And I knew, okay. No matter what they did to you, you’re _Bucky._ You’re the strongest, best person I’ve ever known. There’s no way they could’ve taken it all from you.” Bucky is just too _dynamic_.

Bucky shakes his head, disbelieving. “Always need me there to watch your back for you, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

Bucky shakes his head once more. “I think you kept all the stupid with you.”

His voice becomes wondering as he finishes his sentence. Steve thinks there’s a good chance that Bucky’s just remembered a conversation from long ago. 

Before Steve can ask about it though, Bucky rubs his hand over his face. “There’s so much that you don’t know yet, Steve. I hurt you, Steve. Maybe I didn’t kill _you,_ but there are plenty of times when I did kill others. I’m not strong. I’m not even close.”

Steve can’t stay away then. He steps close to Bucky, making sure to telegraph his moves, and presses his fingers gently over Bucky’s lips. Bucky goes quiet, even though the pressure isn’t enough to keep him from speaking if he wanted to. (Steve won’t ever forget the _muzzle_ of a mask Hydra put on Bucky.) 

“I’ve read your file, Bucky, and you are strong. What they did to you, no one could resist that forever. _I_ couldn’t. _No one_ could. And you tried to escape, Bucky. You tried multiple times, and they had to keep...to keep...wiping your memory because you kept remembering.”

Steve had cried the first time he’d read through the file. It’d taken a number of hours to get through it. 

He’d started reading right there in the cemetery where Natasha had handed it to him, Sam’s hand on his elbow, guiding him along as they walked back to their waiting car. Steve had had to keep putting the file down to wipe his eyes, to lean his head on Sam’s shoulders or, later, to hit one of his many punching bags until it burst. 

He still tears up to think of what Bucky’s been through.

Steve doesn’t realize that he’s started crying until Bucky reaches with his other metal hand to brush away the drops of moisture from his eyes. Steve gasps at the touch, the feel of cool metal and the intent look in Bucky’s eyes.

Bucky quickly drops his hand at the sound.

Steve clasps it lightly before he can fully move away though, and entwines his fingers with Bucky’s metal ones, squeezing gently.

“There is something I wanted to do,” Bucky says after a quiet moment, staring down at their clasped hands. “A reason I asked you all the way out here.”

“What’s that?” Steve asks.

“I don’t remember everything. Probably never will,” Bucky hesitates as he says that, looking unsure, and Steve nods to show he understands, that he accepts this. It’s...not ideal perhaps, but it’s _okay,_ because Bucky is himself no matter what he can or cannot remember. 

Sam’s words, from when they started searching for Bucky after the fall of the helicarriers, ring in his head, _If we find him—_ when _we find him, you gotta accept him as he is now, not just as he was. That’s the only way you can help him, the only way you’ll get him back._

“I know, Buck. It’s okay. I only want you to know yourself.” There’s so much _good_ in Bucky, and Steve couldn’t abide by the thought of him not knowing.

“Natalia—Natasha, she’s helped me a lot with my memory, since, you know…” He trails off and Steve knows he means the Red Room. 

And that’s something that Natasha had only talked with him about in the aftermath of SHIELD’s takedown. _Some of the information is online,_ she’d told him, walking into his room in the apartment he was sharing with Sam, tossing him a bottle of vodka and pouring herself a glass from her own bottle. _But you’re my friend and I want you to hear it from me. I want to talk about it with you._

It means a lot, Steve knows, that Natasha would talk about that experience with Bucky.

“And her friend, the sniper who doesn’t like to use guns. He helped me too. When I didn’t know how to accept what I did as the Winter Soldier. He talked to me about what happened to him, and I still...it’s still a struggle, but they helped.”

It means even more that Natasha brought in Clint to talk to Bucky. And that Clint was willing to talk about what happened to him with Loki.

He can’t believe that Natasha and Clint kept this a secret from him, except that he can because they are both brilliant spies and worthy of being Avengers no matter what the press says sometimes. 

He can’t even be hurt by it because they were obviously trying to do right by Bucky, and Bucky deserves that, needs that, after all he’s been through.

“At first all I could remember were bad things,” Bucky says. “But eventually, I did remember something. Something happy.”

Bucky smiles at him, the corners of his mouth lifting up slightly, teasing and charming. He slowly walks backwards toward the bar against the wall, his gaze not leaving Steve’s, keeping their hands clasped as long as possible before they finally have to let go. 

He finally turns around then and reaches over the bar to bring up a record player, setting on top of the high counter. It’s old and more than a fair bit dusty but when Bucky sets the needle down, music still starts to play after that first familiar crackle.

Kate Smith’s version of _Dream a Little Dream of Me_ begins playing.

Steve can’t help the smile that spreads across his face, though it’s a little bittersweet. This song, like many others Steve now has in his record collection, bring to mind Brooklyn as it was. His _life_ as it was, before the Serum and decades lost to the Arctic. 

He closes his eyes and can see their old apartment. It was always cold, unless it was summer, when it was boiling hot. The water pipes weren’t the best and the floors creaked something fierce. The walls were thin, but it was home because it was his and Bucky’s.

Home in a way that the apartment provided by SHIELD he’d had back in DC could never hope to be.

Steve blinks open his eyes to find Bucky near in front of him once more, watching his face intently. 

Before Steve can ask what Bucky is looking for, Bucky slowly takes Steve’s hand in his and wraps his metal arm around his waist. He waits for Steve to understand what he wants, and then starts dancing with him.

“I...well, I don’t know if you know,” Steve says, after they dance silently for a minute, the music echoing in the room. “But we never actually danced to this before.”

“I know,” Bucky says, succinct. He looks teasing once more, his eyes twinkling in a way Steve definitely remembers.

“There’s lots of different versions of this song now, a couple even a lot more famous than Kate Smith’s,” Steve says at last, feeling his lips twitch up into a smile in response to Bucky’s expression. “I’ve listened to a few of them. They’re good.”

“Perhaps, but this is _our_ version. I remember sitting in our living room with you sketching beside me and this song playing on the radio.”

Suddenly, Steve can picture that evening perfectly. So perfectly he can even remember the smell of frost and wood fires in the air. “Me too. God, I’d almost forgotten that night. I remember drawing a self-portrait because you wouldn’t stop buggin’ me about how I always drew so many pictures of you but none of myself.” 

Bucky had been trying to be kind and encouraging, trying to build Steve up. Steve had gotten into a fight earlier that day, one that he was quite possibly—most definitely—losing before Bucky had come along. 

Steve, he was used to being small, wasn’t ashamed of it like people now seem to believe he must’ve been. Being smaller than most people didn’t make him less worthy a person as his mama and Bucky had liked to remind him. “Small stature doesn’t mean small heart,” he remembers his mother always saying. 

But that evening, bruised and aching, Steve had been a bit down on himself. Bucky soon changed that though, after he sat himself next to Steve on the couch, just by being himself. “Yeah, it was a good night. Because of you.”

“I am different now,” Bucky states, looking Steve straight in the eye. “No way to take back what’s happened since then even if I remember now.”

Steve nods. “I know. I’m different now too. A lot of things are. I think maybe that’s okay. Can be a good thing even.”

Bucky smiles, soft and sweet, the way that only Steve has ever really seen, even back before the Winter Soldier. A smile just for him that Steve has always jealously horded. “Yeah. I mean, I couldn’t do this before. Not that I didn’t want to.”

“What? Dance with me? I seem to recall you teaching me how to dance in our living room one afternoon when you got us a date with a couple of dames—women.” They’d shuffled around their small living room, Steve stepping on Bucky’s toes more often than not, listening to music on the radio that Bucky had salvaged and fixed up himself.

“Hm, yeah,” Bucky says. “But I couldn’t ask you out like I wanted to then. Not without a couple of ‘em to provide cover, and I couldn’t dance with you proper even with them there. I couldn’t ask you to dance like I wanted to, like I’m about to do now.”

Steve freezes. He heard, he thinks he understood, but he can’t make himself _believe_ it. There has to be a limit to how much good can happen to him in one day. “What are you doing now?”

Bucky comes to a stop along with him. He doesn’t take his hands off Steve though, slides his metal hand lower on Steve’s back, tugs him in closer until they’re pressed to together, chests to knees. “Natal—Natasha and Clint tell me I’m ready to go out into the world, that I can’t hide in their safehouse forever. And they told me Stark is hosting some big party at that fancy tower of yours in New York.”

“His,” Steve corrects automatically. He can barely think right now, his head filled with the sound of his pulsing blood.

“It says Avengers on the side, doesn’t it?” Bucky says, smiling. “Pretty sure you’re one of those guys. Anyway, let me finish. And they told me there’s gonna be a party with dancing and drinks and everything.”

“Tony never does anything by halves as I’ve learned.” Steve licks his suddenly dry lips and his heart pounds when he sees Bucky blatantly watching the movement.

They’re quiet for a moment and then, “Be my date?” asks Bucky, easy.

It’s something Steve never believed he could have—never allowed himself to think he could have, Bucky wanting to be with him. The times were different of course, when they were growing up in Brooklyn and fighting their way across Europe. Nonetheless, Steve couldn’t allow himself to ask for more of Bucky. 

Bucky, who already gave so much of himself to Steve, who already got into so many fights for Steve.

It’s so much. Steve feels happier than he thought he ever could be. 

“I would love to go with you. I’ve always wanted to go out dancing with you. Probably longer than you would ever believe,” Steve tells him. “But even Tony’s small parties have a lot of people, and Pepper and Rhodey have told me explosions are not uncommon. And you know you don’t have to do this. I mean, we could do something else. Watch a picture together or something instead. Work up to a big party.”

Bucky shakes his head at Steve’s suggestions. “I know,” Bucky says, cupping a hand over Steve’s jaw. “But you’re Captain America. I mean, you’re Steve Rogers, of course, but your title is Captain America,” Bucky corrects himself. “You’re surrounded by people and explosions a lot of the time and I’m gonna have to get used to them if I want to be around you.”

Steve wants to tell Bucky that he would never put him in a position where he’d be uncomfortable, but Bucky places the tips of his fingers over his lips, quieting him. 

He looks knowingly at Steve. “I do want to be around you. I’m ready,” Bucky says. “I don’t want to hide now that I don’t have to. Now that _we_ don’t have to. I think—I _know_ I’ve never liked hiding.”

“Well you know I’ve never been one to hide or blend in,” Steve says, grinning, remembering countless childhood fights and thinking of his own uniform and shield.

Bucky hums the opening tune to ‘Star-Spangled Man’ and Steve can’t help but lean forward and press a kiss against Bucky’s cheek.

He catches the corner of Bucky’s mouth, and Bucky turns so that lips press together. It’s a chaste kiss, more so than the kiss he shared with Natasha even, but Steve feels his cheeks flush red.

Bucky smiles, tracing a cool, metal finger along Steve’s warm cheek. “Just wait till our goodnight kiss,” he promises.

And suddenly Tony’s party can’t come soon enough.


End file.
